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Facebook Enabled Advertisers To Reach 'Jew Haters' (propublica.org) 253

ProPublica is reporting that Facebook "enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of 'Jew hater,' 'How to burn jews,' or, 'History of why jews ruin the world.'" The organization even went so far as to test these ad categories by paying $30 to target those groups with three "promoted posts" -- in which a ProPublica article or post was displayed in their news feeds. Facebook reportedly approved all three ads within 15 minutes. From the report: After we contacted Facebook, it removed the anti-Semitic categories -- which were created by an algorithm rather than by people -- and said it would explore ways to fix the problem, such as limiting the number of categories available or scrutinizing them before they are displayed to buyers. In all likelihood, the ad categories that we spotted were automatically generated because people had listed those anti-Semitic themes on their Facebook profiles as an interest, an employer or a "field of study." Facebook's algorithm automatically transforms people's declared interests into advertising categories. [ProPublica provides a screenshot of their ad buying process on the company's advertising portal.]

"There are times where content is surfaced on our platform that violates our standards," said Rob Leathern, product management director at Facebook. "In this case, we've removed the associated targeting fields in question. We know we have more work to do, so we're also building new guardrails in our product and review processes to prevent other issues like this from happening in the future."

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Facebook Enabled Advertisers To Reach 'Jew Haters'

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  • Any word on what they were selling to "jew haters?"
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Halal meat, burqas for the missuses, AK-47s for the budget-conscious.

    • by sheramil ( 921315 ) on Friday September 15, 2017 @12:57AM (#55200671)

      False alarm, everyone. They were targeting "Jew hatters" and were looking for a distributor for their yarmulkes.

      (rolls eyes) goyim.

    • Tiki torches?

      • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

        Only in your mind. But I'm guessing "how to beat your wife for not wearing a burka, and making sure it doesn't show in public" is a hot seller among jew haters, especially in the EU, Canada and Australia. Along with 23 reasons why Jews are less then dogs(quite popular with the imam crowd -- going by their rants). And "slavery for fun and profit, what do do with your sex slave when she's been passed around 283 times." Which is apparently popular with the ISIS loving caliphate, and girls who run off there

    • by Cederic ( 9623 )

      Three ways to target that particular group:
      - exploit them
      - educate them
      - exclude them

      All of them can be done maliciously or for good purposes.

      • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        I can see how exclusion could possible be both good or malicious but the other two not so much.

        Malicious education isn't really education at all anymore, we have other words for that: lies, propaganda, brainwashing, gaslighting.

        Exploitation by its very nature is well exploitative. You are turning someone eases efforts to your objectives and not theirs. Which you fundamentally have no right to do unless you want to talk about "useful idiots" and ends justifying the means. Which generally does not fly with

  • Twitter, Facebook, Google and other companies keep blaming some sir or madamn called "algorithm" for everything they do wrong these days?

    • by sconeu ( 64226 )

      It's because Al Gore (ithm) invented the internet.

      • That's my dad-joke! Give it back!
      • So it's yet another -ism? In this case the Al-Gore-ism?

        Is that when you start talking nonsense and produce mostly hot air?

        And I know there's some AGW joke in there somewhere, too, but I'm in AlGoreism mode now. Someone else is gonna take care of it, I already pointed it out. Now I think I should write a book about it.

    • Twitter, Facebook, Google and other companies keep blaming some sir or madamn called "algorithm" for everything they do wrong these days?

      I thought

      "There are times where content is surfaced on our platform that violates our standards," said Rob Leathern, product management director at Facebook. "In this case, we've removed the associated targeting fields in question. We know we have more work to do, so we're also building new guardrails in our product and review processes to prevent other issues like this from happening in the future."

      was corporatese for "an intern did it".

  • The money shot (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Friday September 15, 2017 @12:13AM (#55200545) Journal

    The devil is in the details:

    Last week, acting on a tip, we logged into Facebook’s automated ad system to see if “Jew hater” was really an ad category. We found it, but discovered that the category — with only 2,274 people in it — was too small for Facebook to allow us to buy an ad pegged only to Jew haters.

    Facebook’s automated system suggested “Second Amendment” as an additional category that would boost our audience size to 119,000 people, presumably because its system had correlated gun enthusiasts with anti-Semites.

    The site shows users how Facebook categorizes them. It doesn’t reveal the data it is buying about their offline lives.
    Instead, we chose additional categories that popped up when we typed in “jew h”: “How to burn Jews,” and “History of ‘why jews ruin the world.’” Then we added a category that Facebook suggested when we typed in “Hitler”: a category called “Hitler did nothing wrong.” All were described as “fields of study.”

  • Aah, discrimination: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.

  • "After we contacted Facebook, it removed the anti-Semitic categories -- which were created by an algorithm rather than by people"

    On FB even the algorithms are Nazis, that's what we can expect from AI.

  • Finally a way to target those vaginal douches to the most deserving audience.

  • So removing that category also removed them from existence and removes their profile data? Wow, who knew? In fact it magically makes racism go away by plugging your ears and pretending you don't hear it. That's SJW logic right there. By the way, "jew haters" buy products too.
    • So removing that category also removed them from existence and removes their profile data?

      That straw man is old and tired. If a hotel bans prostitutes from plying their trade in the hotel, the hotel staff doesn't have the illusion that they are ending prostitution, they just don't want to be associated with prostitution.

  • Facebook is just providing a category to advertisers here. It doesn't mean at all they will allow hate speech to appear in ads. And if they do, this is another but completely unrelated matter.
    TFA goes on and on about how they are outraged because they were able to submit an acceptable ad to be seen by unacceptable people. If it means that "jew haters" shouldn't be able to get ads, by all means, make me a Nazi.

    Removing the category also prevent anti hate speech organizations from targeting the people they wa

  • If you look at the ad-buying screenshot, these categories are under "Education - Field of Study" which leads me to believe these are anthropologists as opposed to hate group members.
  • ... there goes the market for white bed sheets.

  • If you create content by a purely random process, or else get content through user input (which is like random, only malicious and sick), you must filter out the objectionable material that is guaranteed to be there! Remember Tay, Microsoft's Nazi Teen Chat Bot? [theverge.com].

UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn

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